Houthis

The Houthis (Arabic: الحوثيون‎ al-Ḥūthiyyūn), officially called Ansar Allah (anṣār allāh أنصار الله "Supporters of God"), is a Zaidi Shia-led movement from Sa'dah, northern Yemen. The group was founded by Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi who started a rebellion in 2004 which led to a Houthi insurgency in Yemen against then President, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The group has been led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi since Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi was reportedly killed by Yemeni army forces in 2004.

The Houthis participated in the 2011 Yemeni Revolution, as well as the ensuing National Dialogue Conference (NDC). However, they rejected the provisions of the November 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council deal on the ground that "it divided Yemen into poor and wealthy regions" and also in response to assassination of their representative at NDC.

In 2014–2015 Houthis took over the government in Sana'a, which led to the fall of the Saudi Arabian-backed government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. Houthis and their allies have gained control of a significant part of Yemen's territory and are currently resisting the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen seeking to restore Hadi in power. Both the Houthis and the Saudi Arabian-led coalition are being attacked by the Islamic State terrorist group.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia (ⁱ/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, ⁱ/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km² (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast, and Yemen to the south. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid inhospitable desert or barren landforms.

The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. The country has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamic lines. The ultra-conservative Wahhabism religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spreading largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca), and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. The Kingdom has a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million are Saudi nationals and 8 million are foreigners.

War diary

A war diary is a regularly updated official record kept by military units of their activities during wartime. The purpose of these diaries is to both record information which can later be used by the military to improve its training and tactics as well as to generate a detailed record of units' activities for future use by historians. War diaries are focused on the administration and operations of the unit they cover, and generally do not contain information about individual personnel.

War diaries were invented by the Prussian Army. On 22 April 1850, the Prussian Minister of War, August von Stockhausen, ordered that all commanders of major units should keep war diaries. All significant military actions, relocations, important messages and orders, casualties, material losses, reinforcements etc. were to be recorded. Subsequent regulations of 1870, 1895, 1916 and 1940 were largely identical to the 1850 regulations.

The British Army first required that its units keep war diaries in 1907 as a means of preventing its mistakes of the Second Boer War from being repeated, and units currently operating in Afghanistan continue to maintain such diaries. The war diaries kept by Australian military units are normally maintained by the unit's adjutant or intelligence officer and contain a regularly updated narrative of its activities as well as copies of reports, messages received and maps.